This paper models the relationship between countries' distance from global economic activity, endogenous investments in education, and economic development. Firms in remote locations pay greater trade costs on both exports and intermediate imports, reducing the amount of value added left to...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between the spatial distribution of economic activity and transportation costs. We develop a multi-region model of economic geography that we use to understand the general equilibrium implications of transportation...

Previous work on transportation investments has focused on average impacts in high- and middle-income countries. We estimate average and heterogeneous effects in a poor continent, Africa, using roads and cities data spanning 50 years in 39 countries. Using changes in market access due to distant...

The theoretical framework of urban and regional economics is built on transportation costs for manufactured goods. But over the twentieth century, the costs of moving these goods have declined by over 90% in real terms, and there is little reason to doubt that this decline will continue....

We use anonymized and aggregated data from Facebook to explore the spatial structure of social networks in the New York metro area. We highlight the importance of transportation infrastructure in shaping urban social networks by showing that travel time and travel costs are substantially...

When economic activity is concentrated over space or over time, it is more efficient. Most production occurs in geographic hot spots, and most production occurs between 9 and 12 in the morning and 1 to 5 in the afternoon on weekdays. The thick-market efficiencies that encourage the concentration...

A Melitz-style model of monopolistic competition with heterogeneous firms is integrated into a simple New Economic Geography model to show that the standard assumption of identical firms is neither necessary nor innocuous. We show that re-locating to the big region is most attractive for the...